The Brides of Rollrock Island (22 page)

M
am paced back and forth, the blanket dragging behind her like turf pulled free of the ground and fashioned into a rough cloak. From one window, she went past the closed front door to the other. I did not try to hear words in what she muttered, in her odd bits of song, a whine here, a whisper there. They made as much sense as the swish and scratch of the blanket, or the hiss of her foot-soles on the gray boards.

She paused by one of the windows, fenced off from me by the chair backs, a seaweedy hummock of shoulders and then her head against the glary cloud light, her hair pushed and pulled a little, some strands waving in the wind of her warmth. She applied herself to the view and was silent, and I stood in the hallway, listening to her upsetness.

I knew better than to ask her what was the matter. Often enough she had told me in the past:
I come from the sea, and I miss the sea
. How could she miss the sea? I would wonder. It was right
there at the bottom of the town, for anyone to visit! I would suggest, when I was smaller,
Shall I take you down to the beach, Mam? It’s not far. We could bring your blanket and freshen it up in the water
. I had suggested this even in November sometimes, with snow drifting down outside.
No, my darling
, she would say.
Thank you, my darling, but no. There is nothing you can do
. And I had heard the same from many other lads, that their mam was low, today or this week or these last several months, and whatever they tried they could not raise her. They had sat her in the sun, brought her any kitten or duckling they could find, walked her on the shore up and down, and nothing would console her.

I went to Mam, stood at the sill as if I too were interested in the day outside. The same lanes as ever slanted away, the one up, the one down. The same front steps shone whitewashed like lamps along the lane. The same tedious cat sat in Trumbells’ window, now blinking out at us, now dozing. And through the gaps and beyond some of the roofs, the sea rode to the horizon, dark as charcoal, flat as slate, with neither sail nor dinghy nor dragon to relieve its emptiness.

She turned and turned her silver wedding ring; sometimes she would do this till the flesh reddened around it. She pressed and turned, as if working it free took quite some effort, though the ring always slid loose between her knuckle and finger joint.

I laid my hand on her darker one. She looked down from the view.

“What is it, Daniel?”

I took her hands one from the other. I turned to the window again, and brought her ring hand over my shoulder and down to
my chest. There I held it and took from her the task of turning the warm silver, moving it much more gently upon her finger than she had been doing.

She laughed very softly, deep in her throat. “Sweetest boy.” She kissed the top of my head and then laid her other hand there. And so we stood, she cloaked with the blanket and me wearing her like a cloak, turning the ring on her finger while outside the steps glowed and the cat dozed and the sea sat flat behind it all, nothing of anything changing.

First the mainland was a black fingernail’s edge between the pale sea and the pale sky. I pulled Dad’s sleeve as he talked to Mister Fisher, who was crossing the Strait to buy some tins and vegetables for the store.

“There it is, yes,” Dad said to me, and gazed at it to satisfy me.

“Don’t you be fooled, young Daniel,” Fisher said around Dad’s front. “It may look like the land of promise, but Rollrock’s best, home is best.”

Dad squeezed my shoulder, invisibly to Fisher. Did he mean me to listen carefully to Fisher, or to ignore him and flee to mainland as soon as I ever could?

We stood at the rail in the biting autumn wind. Mam had combed me with hair polish this morning; I had watched in the mirror as she made two slick curves of my hair, either side of a raw white parting. My whole head had felt scraped and cold, and now the wind had chilled my scalp and ears to a numb helmet.

Slowly the land rose and unrolled out of the horizon: two rounded hills with others either side like attendants. The sea slopped and danced below us. The sky blued up stronger as the sun ascended, and shapes emerged on the land, forested parts and fields. Roofs and roads glinted. Then the black cliffs lifted and obscured all this awhile, before splitting apart head from head to show it all again, closer and more dazzling between them.

Nothing, I thought, could be more exciting than chugging between the Heads. Cordlin Harbor spread out wide either side, serene and glossy after the tumbled sea, after the beating of the waves at the cliffs’ feet. Rank after rank of boats were moored alongside the piers, and others lay looser about the more open water, each ketch and trawler kissing its morning reflection, each little pleasure boat. Cordlin town lay thick around the harbor and on the nearest slopes, thinned away higher up the hills to single cottages and barns like drops of milk around porridge in a bowl. Closer windows winked at us, and the great granaries and wool stores stood with their barred windows and red and white brickwork, and I saw for the first time how humble my home island was, beside this center of wealth and commerce.

“We will catch the bus,” said Dad to me. “It goes right from the pier. See it there?”

“So we’ll not see this town, so much?” I said. It seemed so rich in sights, with its wall of warehouses along the front, its several steeples beyond and its flagged castle at the top. Shining trucks and motors glided along by the water.

“Can you not let the lad at the fleshpots of Cordlin Harbor, Mallett?” laughed Fisher. “Even to the extent of a raspberry lollipop at Missus Hedly’s shop?”

“We’ve business.” My dad shook his head and smiled. “Knocknee Market will have to be excitement enough for the boy.”

All the jollity fell from Mister Fisher’s face. “Of course. You’re not here for treats and dillydallying, are you?” He gave me a guarded look and Dad a worried one. “Best of luck with that, Dominic.”

And when the boat was tied up by the pier, among the shuffle of passengers toward the gangplank Fisher let his hand fall heavily to my shoulder, as if he were seeing us off to a funeral, or to a surgeon whose treatment it was doubtful we would survive.

The bus was a marvelous shining thing, painted cream and green, a crest on the side of it and a number plate behind. People, Cordlin people, people who rode buses every day, sat in it waiting for Dad—and me holding fast to Dad’s hand—to climb on and pay our fares, and sit in the glossy red seats.

The trip to Knocknee was all new sights and events, one piled on the next so that my telling of them, which at first I tried to rehearse to Mam in my head, fast became garbled and then fell to silence. I hung on to the windowsill, grateful that Dad looked over me, and would see the important things, would collect any details that I might miss. Presently the overwhelming town with its too many faces, its too many curtains and gates and grand trees and window boxes, sank away and we were flying among fields, and this I could follow more easily, the fields in their emptiness, and the hills in their billowing roundness being much like the sea, which I was well used to gazing on.

The engine must have been right below our seat, it shook our bottoms so. I turned to Dad: “Such a noisy way to get about.”

“It is indeed,” he said. “Noisier than a boat, and certainly
noisier than a man’s own legs. But fast,” he added. “And fast is what we’re wanting, to reach inland and back in a day.”

Once we were at Knocknee—which was less grand than Cordlin, but busy still with the market day, and just as overwhelming to a Rollrock lad—my dad went through the crowd, asking this person and that a question. I could never quite hear what he said, but it made their eyes slide aside, their heads shake and their bodies turn away. I ran about after him, and the running, and the noticing of everything—dogs, red hairs and red faces, improbable piles of vegetables, excessive rows of meat butchered and hung—eventually tired me, and chilled me to shivering. Dad put me on a bench against a wall of the market square that was lit with the weak autumn sun. “Wait here while I search on, Daniel; I’ll be back to fetch you when I’ve had some luck.”

Before long someone else was put there, at the other end of the bench, someone in skirts, and with a great deal more hair than I had. I had got my breath by then, and was beginning to thaw out in the sunshine. When we had caught each other glancing several times, “I know what you are,” I said to her.

She stopped swinging her legs. She looked at me and narrowed her eyes, which were pale like a dad’s. “Well, what?”

“You are a girl-child,” I said.

She gave a small hiccup of a laugh. “No joking!” she said. “Good thing that you told me.” And she swung her legs some more and looked about at the legs and bums and baskets and bustle. “I’d’ve gone on thinking myself a jee-raff for who knows how long.”

“You are, aren’t you?” I said. “A girl?”

She looked me up and down. Her breath was white on the air,
air that smelt strongly of the smoked-meat stall nearby, and not at all of the sea. “Are you touched, or what?”

“I haven’t ever met one before,” I said.

She snorted.

“It’s true,” I said. “We don’t have them on Rollrock.”

Her face got more startled, and prettier. “You’re from Rollrock Isle?”

“I am,” I said. “My dad brought me over this morning.”

“For the first-ever time?” Now I was interesting, and she seemed to have stopped disliking me, which was good.

“First ever,” I said.

“You’ve been on that one island all your life.”

I searched her face for why she should sound so astonished. “I have,” I said. “And on lots of sea around it.”

“I’ve never seen the sea yet,” she said. “My mam and dad won’t take me. Say it sends men potty. Is your dad potty?”

“Of course not.” I looked about for him. None of these legs were his, none of these hatted heads, fuzzy-rimmed against the sunshine.

“Are
you
potty?” said the girl.

“No!”

She laughed at me, but not unkindly. What a
lot
of hair she had, and it was not straight and silky like a mam’s. If you took that band off, undid that ribbon, loosed it from those plaits, it would stand straight out from her head, or possibly get up and walk right off her, or catch fire from the combination of so many hot red strands together.

“You might be anything,” she said, “with your great eyes.”

I turned from her embarrassed, and again she laughed. These girl-children were certainly unsettling.

“What brings you, then,” she said, as if she had a perfect right to know, “you and your dad, to Knocknee?”

“My dad has business here, he said.” Again I searched the crowd, for I rather wished he would burst out now, perhaps with something for me to eat, some mainland fancy.

“Cloth, maybe?”

“He has to find someone. A girl, like you.”

“Do you
really
not have girls there, on Rollrock? Is it all potty boys and men?”

“We have
women
,” I said, stung. “We have very beautiful women, all our mams.”

“Ye-es.” She narrowed her eyes at me again, and breathed more breath-smoke. “That is your specialty out there, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?” I stiffened further, not knowing how insulted I ought to be.

“I’m trying to remember. I’ve heard mams talking. There’s something about those Rollrock women, isn’t there?”

“Maybe,” I said. “But they’re our mams, so don’t you say anything that might get you popped on the snout.”

“Well, they must be unusual, to’ve begot an unusual like you,” she said sensibly, looking me up and down again.

“They’re usual for our town,” I said. “Perfectly usual.” And I turned back to the crowd, to the sun.

Dad came then and rescued me, for finally he’d had some success with his questions. He knew where to look for the girl now.

He took me there, and it was a very smelly part of the town;
some kind of offal was piled and straggling in the drain outside her family’s house, and inside, in a wall corner, lay a cat that at first I was sure was dead, until it lifted its mean triangle of a face and showed me eyes whitened by some dreadful town disease.

Dad talked to what I thought at first was the girl’s grandma, she had so few teeth and was so weathered—but it turned out to be her mam. She watched my dad as if he might snap at and bite her, as if he were there to trick her and she ought to be very careful.

The girl herself was orange-haired like everyone here, but she was not so clean as the market girl, or so slender. She had something of the twitching of the mam about her, and a sneaky manner that was all her own. She sat listening closely, pursing her lips, her glance flicking from Dad to her mam and back again. She had tied her pinafore strangely; as well as the straps crossed on her back she had brought the waist ties around and crossed them over her stout front. It gave me a very uncomfortable feeling to look at her; who would
make
a pinafore with such long straps? It was as if her head was on backward. She ignored me as too young to be of any account, and I was glad of it.